No he didn't, it was needlessly confusing and the fact that it introduced uninformed and unresolved intrigue for him and his wife goes entirely against the point he was trying to make. The reason being that: context is everything. When we structure a project status report this way, context is high and the audience desires new information over and above further context unless the balance changes.
Starting with "I'm okay" was the right thing to do in context: an unexpected call from a child at an ominous time of day is the context, and knowledge of their safety is therefore paramount. But following it with a riddle about bulls is useless nonsense in the same context.
Putting that aside, I didnt really appreciate this either:
>Though a bit angry
Angry at your son for being in a car accident? Was this before or after finding out the reason for the accident? Where is this context and why isn't it provided in the same structure you just outlined several paragraphs earlier?
I agree and this is a practical method that I've seen work well in several companies I've worked for. However I think there's a bigger problem that contributes to the loss of "spark" that the author strangely didn't address at all.
The fruits of labor grow ever higher. By which I mean: In the early days of a startup the problem space is ripe and plentiful, the impact you can have is outsized, and the pool of people with which to share it is the smallest it will ever be.
As a company grows, all three of these factors are subject to strain. The problem space becomes sparser, outsized impacts are recognised further up the ever-growing hierarchy, and the pool of people with which you're sharing your impact becomes larger and recognition becomes shorter lived and more diffuse.
There is also a dynamic aspect to that: the original team who started the startup has battle scars, they used to take risk, but now they have a natural incentive to be more conservative, preserve the way things were done.
As a military officer who was watching CNN live from inside an aircraft carrier (moored) when he said that, being in charge of anti-terrorism on the ship at the time, it was absolutely foundational to my approach to so many things after that. Here's the actual footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REWeBzGuzCc
Rumsfeld was complicated, but there's no doubt he was very effective at leading the Department. I think most people fail to realize how sophisticated the Office of the Secretary of Defense is. Their resources reel the mind, most of all the human capital, many with PhDs, many very savvy political operators with stunning operational experiences. As a small example, as I recall, Google's hallowed SRE system was developed by an engineer who had come up through the ranks of Navy nuclear power. That's but one small component reporting into OSD.
Not a Rumsfeld apologist, by any means. Errol Morris did a good job showing the man for who he is, and it's not pretty (1). But reading HN comments opining about the leadership qualities of a Navy fighter pilot who was both the youngest and oldest SECDEF makes me realize how the Internet lets people indulge in a Dunning-Kruger situation the likes of which humanity has never seen.
> Google's hallowed SRE system was developed by an engineer who had come up through the ranks of Navy nuclear power
Wait, really? That makes _so much sense._ It also makes me upset that all of my attempts to sway other SRE orgs over to Nuclear Navy practices have been met with doubt.
I'll support you there. In any sensible reading of Nuremberg, they all deserve to hang from the neck until dead. But the central moral failure was Bush. Letting Cheney hijack the vp search, and then pairing him up with Rumsfeld was a bad move, and obviously bad at the time. Those two had established themselves as brilliant but paranoid kooks with their Team B fantasies in the 70s, and should never have been allowed free rein.
> [...] the Internet lets people indulge in a Dunning-Kruger situation the likes of which humanity has never seen.
While we are at it, that infamous Dunning-Kruger study showed didn't even claim what people like to pretend it claimed. In addition the more nuanced claim they did make is not supported by the evidence they collected and presented in their paper. (Their statistics are pretty much useless, and as with any social science study, it has a small 'n' and it doesn't replicate.)
But the mythology 'Dunning-Kruger effect' is too good to pass up in Internet discussions, so it survives as a meme.
I didn't know the names of Dunning or Kruger. I was a medical student who surveyed my classmates on their study habits and also asked them which quintile of the class they believed they stood in. My response rate was high enough that it was impossible to believe so few people from the bottom quintile had responded, and the upper 2 and 3 quintiles were impossibly overpopulated. That's how I learned about the effect. I didn't learn about Dunning and Kruger for several years after that, but when I did, oh boy, did the lights come one.
So, the current fashion of denouncing Dunning and Kruger doesn't jive with me. It was too obvious to discount and I had no idea of the concept when I saw it my own data. I think the misunderstanding has to do with the idea that it's about dumb people being dumb. It's about all of us. We all get it wrong. Even the smart ones. Paradoxically, the smart ones just get it wrong in the less desirable direction.
I think that academic fashionistas may be too clever by half here. Unless you have original data to back up a claim, the internet points aren't worth it. Focus on getting things right.
That it came from Donald Rumsfeld in the context of what we know now and what he surely knew then is why it's such a good quote. The words basically say nothing but are also true about everything. So it can implicit be a warning that there is probably some bullshit going on or someone has a sense of humor and is also warning people while also avoiding the subject - of course just my opinion. How people actually use it will depend what the audience agrees it to mean.
The common use I'm referring to is similar to the OP, which is using it as a framework for assessing risk. In particular, aligning a team on the "known unknowns" is critical to building the confidence and alignment needed as a group to be able to deal with unquantifiable/inestimable risk.
I just took a look at that wiki article for Rumsfeld's usage of the "There are unknown unknowns" and I had no idea that he barrowed this phrase to frame his arguments and I was only familiar with that context, unfortunately.
"What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns," the things we don't know that we know."
I've found it's really critical during the project planning phase to get to not just where the boundaries of our knowledge are, but also where are the things we're either tacitly assuming or not even aware that we've assumed. An awful lot of postmortems I've been a part of have come down to "It didn't occur to us that could happen."
I really enjoy the concept of unknown knowns, but I don’t agree with your example, which is an unknown unknown.
To me the corporate version of the unknown known is when a a project is certainly
doomed, for reasons everyone on the ground knows about, yet nobody wants to say anything and be the messenger that inevitably gets killed, as long as paycheck keeps clearing. An exec ten thousand feet from the ground sets a “vision” which can’t be blown off course by minor details such as reality, until the day it does.
Theranos is a famous example of this but I’ve had less extreme versions happen to me many times throughout my career.
Another example of unknown knowns might be the conflict between companies stated values (Focus on the User) and the unstated values that are often much more important (Make Lots of Money)
I think unknown knowns are more easy to spot when teaching newcomers how the system works. Their questions will sometimes be about things we hadn't even considerered (at least in some time) to be the case, but when you have to spell everything out it is indeed the case. In terms of teaching unknown knowns are critical to identify and instead make known knowns so that everyone can end up with a mostly equal playing field.
As an example, there are a lot of unknown knowns that you accumulate over the years in certain lower level languages that need to be spelled out more clearly to someone who is coming at it as a later endeavor. It's entirely possible to spend all your time in a completely managed language nowadays and the concept of the stack, heap, etc., will be largely alien to you. These ideas and their limitations need to be spelled out clearly in order for someone to build the same knowledge base and intuition.
Unknown knowns are essentially endless in nature and extremely hard to find unless you have someone who simply doesn't know to basically fall into traps and guide you toward finding your hidden knowledge.
Usually there's a tacit assumption of how the system works, how the users are using the system, or something else about the system or the environment that causes that - it's not that the answer wasn't known, it's that it was assumed to be something it wasn't and nobody realized that was an assumption and not a fact.
Whenever I'm sat in a four mile tailback at 6pm, I often look at everyone in the cars around me and, if they make eye contact, I give them a little nod and a smile, as though to say, "We chose this. This was a great choice".
Take advantage of the fact that you can change companies to somewhere that provides you with enough compensation to live near your work. This might require a move. People have moved for work for centuries.
Moving is a burden of a highly varying degree. The implication that it is a non-factor points to a fundamental absence of shared experience between you and the people you are criticizing.
I have moved significantly more than the average person to do exactly what I’m talking about here. Without money, with money, without kids, with kids. I feel like I have a pretty reasonable amount of experience.
I work for a company that's fully distributed, and do ~2k miles a year, almost exclusively to visit family.
Your halfway-house "build your life around your career" mentality appealed to me in my early 20s when I was on starter salaries and was unmarried and childless. That is no longer the case and you couldn't - as I've had the pleasure of telling several interviewers - pay me to return to it.
I believe the part about hard coding production data was referring to recreation of the bug, not implementing the solution which the author describes subsequently as "a couple of array functions".
There's a fair bit of hand waving going on with technical details throughout but I don't think it's badly intended, more aimed at keeping the focus on the organisational issues described.
My problem with this isn't even that it's a bunch of strung together ideas without a clear narrative or conclusion; enough practice at this combined with actual deep field knowledge results in works like Godel, Escher, Bach.
My problem is that GHotz is a shitty writer, has puddle deep knowledge of anything that isn't iPhone firmware, and watching him play at being a freelance tech journo and produce this kind of hollow pseudo-philosophy that is meant to sound epiphanal but comes across as deeply naïve to anyone with any actual experience in these topics.
I have a morbid fondness for the fella, because he reminds me of how I sounded a few years back when I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out where all this stuff was going to go, while also being too drunk and too lonely to get any serious research done. I don't think I'd enjoy meeting him in person much, though. I get annoyed by loud personalities like that.
I was a huge fan of him in the 2010s when he was fighting the good fight for right to repair / sideload / do whatever. He was a bit of an idol while I spent my own time hacking Xbox hard drives and building tooling to write xfat headers and such.
It just seems he hasn't grown a jot since then. I've been guilty of writing stuff like this even in recent years, but I've grown enough to check myself and hold a higher bar for the quality of my writing. Assuming he did read this back to himself, the fact that he saw it as publishable is a bit sad.
I find him very entertaining to listen to, and I often end up agreeing with him, but he’s definitely not the most “coherent” individual out there (like jobs/woz/carmack/pg/etc.)
At the same time, he’s out there talking and writing, I’m sure if he continues he’ll get good. Nobody’s born a good writer and you only become one by writing a lot.
I don't wish him any ill and hope the same... But it's been over a decade since I started following him and if there is a trajectory to maturity and quality in his writing, I haven't been able to track it.
And that's putting aside his recent Twitter drama ...
I believe you're being unnecessarily mean here. He managed to write enough of a low level GPU driver to compile and execute neural network kernels. Calling that "puddle deep knowledge" is pretty dismissive considering that CUDA is Nvidia's most profitable moat.
I called his writing shitty. I like George and have used a lot the tools he's written over the years. I've made similar tools myself. Are you so offended that I have a single critical opinion of him? Because that's a reflection of you, not I.
I would guess it's that GHotz is a shitty writer, has puddle deep knowledge of anything that isn't iPhone firmware, and plays at being a freelance tech journo and produces this kind of hollow pseudo-philosophy that is meant to sound epiphanal but comes across as deeply naïve to anyone with any actual experience in these topics.
Starting with "I'm okay" was the right thing to do in context: an unexpected call from a child at an ominous time of day is the context, and knowledge of their safety is therefore paramount. But following it with a riddle about bulls is useless nonsense in the same context.
Putting that aside, I didnt really appreciate this either:
>Though a bit angry
Angry at your son for being in a car accident? Was this before or after finding out the reason for the accident? Where is this context and why isn't it provided in the same structure you just outlined several paragraphs earlier?